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MISSOURI'S CENTENNIAL 



BY 

WALTER B; STEVENS 



WALTER B. STEVENS 



PUBLISHED BY 

THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MISSOURI 

COLUMBIA. MISSOURI 

1917 



MISSOURFS CENTENNIAL. 



BY 

Walter B. Stevens.* 

Other States have birthdays, Missouri has birth years. 
In other commonwealths the centennial of statehood means 
a celebration of local concern. Missouri approaches the 
observance of a centennial period of nation-wide interest. 
One hundred years ago there was before the American people 
no issue greater, more serious than "the Missouri question." 

The action of President White and his associates of the 
State Historical Society in calling together this Committee 
of One Thousand is timely. Missouri's Centennial will begin 
in another month. That centennial is not limited to a day, 
a month, or even a year. It is a period. In 1817 the move- 
ment for statehood of Missouri had its formal beginning. 
That year was known to its generation as "the maniacal 
year." In Old Franklin, St. Charles, Herculaneum, Ste. 
Genevieve, Cape Girardeau, St. Louis and all of the other 
centers fast growing in population, men were signing peti- 
tions praying the Congress of the United States that Mis- 
souri Territory "may be admitted into the Union on an equal 
footing with the original States." They were not crazy. 



*(An address delivered before the Missouri Centennial Committee of One Thou- 
sand, at Kansas City, November 24, 1916.) 

(249) 



250 MISSOURI HISTORICAL REVIEW. 

The statehood movement gave no reason for the desig- 
nation of 1817 as "the maniacal year." There were many 
other events of an exciting character. To settle personal 
differences Missourians made several visits to Bloody Island 
that year. Benton fought his two duels with Lucas. The 
territorial legislature granted three charters for lotteries, — 
one for an^ academy at Potosi, one for a fire engine at St. 
Louis, and one for a masonic hall. The first steamboat 
arrived at St. Louis and Missourians paid a dollar apiece to 
step on board and look around. So many availed themselves 
of this privilege that the captain admitted them in relays 
to avert capsizing. The bank of Missouri was started and 
paper money, redeemable at a distant point, was issued. 
But what set Missouri wildest was the immigration. The 
Rev. Dr. John Mason Peck arrived and wrote this of what 
he saw: 

"The 'new comers,' like a mountain torrent, poured into 
the country faster than it was possible to provide corn for 
breadstuff. Some families came in the spring of 1815. But 
in the winter, spring, summer and autumn of 1816, they came 
like an avalanche. It seemed as though Kentucky and 
Tennessee were breaking up and moving to the 'Far West.' 
Caravan after caravan passed over the prairies of Illinois, 
crossing the 'great river' at St. Louis, all bound to the Boone's 
Lick. The stream of immigration had not lessened in 1817. 
Many families came from Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, 
and not a few from the Middle States, while a sprinkling found 
their way to the extreme West from Yankeedom and York- 
dom. Following in the wake of this exodus to the middle 
section of Missouri was a terrific excitement about land." 



It was high time, in 1817, for Missourians to ask state- 
hood. Across the river, Illinois, with less population than 
Missouri, was signing petitions for admission. Seven States 
had been added to the original Thirteen. Missouri was 
growing faster than any of them. Moreover Missouri had 
a claim to statehood based on international treaty. When 
France ceded to the United States the great territory west 



Missouri's centennial. 251 

of the Mississippi, it was stipulated that the inhabitants, 
"shall be incorporated in the Union of the United States 
and admitted, as soon as possible, according to the principles 
of the federal constitution, to the enjoyment of all the rights, 
advantages and immunities of citizens of the United States." 
That agreement between France and the United States had 
been in effect fourteen years when Missourians moved in 
the matter of statehood. 

The Missouri petitions were presented to Congress on 
the 8th of January, 1818. The date was fitting. It was 
the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans fought by 
Andrew Jackson with Missouri lead. That same month the 
petitions for Illinois were presented. Before the end of the 
year. Congress had enacted the necessary legislation for 
Illinois, and the convention had met at Kaskaskia to frame 
a constitution. Thus Illinois, in December, 1818, was made 
a State. Missouri waited — waited from January 8, 1818, to 
March 6, 1820, for the enabling act. Meantime a great and 
dangerous game in national politics went on. The Senate, by 
a majority vote, was ready to admit Missouri. The House of 
Representatives insisted that Missouri must abolish slavery 
gradually and must put into the constitution a promise to 
that effect, as a condition of admission to the Union. 

Week after week the one-horse mail brought to Missouri 
the aggravating news. Congress adjourned in March, 1819, 
the Senate and the House in deadlock on the bill. Then the 
storm of resentment in Missouri broke. 

One grand jury after another delivered its pronounce- 
ment. The grand jury at St. Louis declared that the course 
of Congress was "an unconstitutional and an unwarrantable 
usurpation over our inalienable rights and privileges as a 
free people." 

The grand jury of Jefferson county, while declaring that 
"slavery is an evil we do not pretend to deny," argued that 
the Constitution of the United States did not empower Con- 
gress "by express grant or necessary implication to make 
the whole or any part of the constitution" of a State. 



252 MISSOURI HISTORICAL REVIEW. 

One hundred years ago Missouri Territory was divided 
into seven counties. The grand jury of every county went 
on record in most formal protest against the attitude of 
Congress towards Missouri Territory. 

From April, 1819, to December, 1819, wherever Mis- 
sourians assembled, resolutions were adopted or toasts were 
drank in defiance of the dictation by Congress as to what 
should be put in the constitution on the subject of 
slavery. And these sentiments were indorsed with pro- 
longed cheers. In these modern days, people applaud by 
the watch. The minutes are timed. Newspapers and 
partisans measure popular sentiment by the duration of the 
applause. A hundred years ago the successive cheers were 
counted. After drinking fervently to a sentiment the people 
"hip hip hurrahed." Their enthusiasm was measured by 
the number of these cheers. There was no fictitious swelling 
of sound by blowing of horns, by the ringing of cowbells, 
by the stamping of feet. It was all vociferous. And when 
the tumult and the shouting died, everybody knew that the 
sentiment or the candidate had been indorsed by one or ten 
or twenty cheers. Thus at a St. Louis meeting, over which 
Auguste Chouteau presided, the Missouri Gazette reported 
that these two toasts "received the largest number of cheers." 

"The next Congress — A sacred regard for the Constitu- 
tion, in preference to measures of supposed expediency, will 
insure to them the confidence of the American people." 
"Nineteen cheers. Yankee Doodle (music)." 

"The Territory of Missouri — With a population of near 
100,000, demands her right to be admitted into the Union, 
on an equal footing with the original States." "Nineteen 
cheers — 'Scott's o'er the Border.' 

Within the present year there has appeared a book with 
the title "Missouri's Struggle for Statehood," by Floyd C. 
Shoemaker, the secretary of the State Historical Society. 
Mr. Shoemaker has devoted the spare hours of five years to 
the assembling of information about the "Struggle." He 
has gone to original sources for the graphic details of Mis- 
souri's protest. 



Missouri's centennial. 253 

Even the ministers of the Gospel were not silent. The 
Baptist Association, assembled "at Pleasant Green Meeting 
House" in Howard county, resolved that we "believe the 
question of slavery is one that belongs exclusively to the 
people to decide on." 

That was mild and dignified, however, as compared with 
the other sentiments thundered from the Mississippi and 
Missouri river settlements. 

At Franklin, when the whole Boone's Lick country was 
celebrating the arrival of the first steamboat, Stephen Rector, 
of the truculent and fighting tribe of Rectors, aroused the 
banqueters with, — 

"May the Missourians defend their rights, if necessary, 
even at the expense of blood, against the unprecedented 
restriction which was attempted to be imposed upon them 
by the Congress of the United States." 

Tallmadge and Taylor were two northern Representatives 
in Congress who led the fight to make Missouri come in as a 
free State. At the Fourth of July celebration in St. Louis 
that year, the Missourians paid their respects to these two 
statesmen in this toast: 

"Messrs. Tallmadge and Taylor — Politically insane, — 
May the next Congress appoint them a dark room, a straight 
waistcoat and a thin water gruel diet." 

The toast was drunk, and the newspaper report says it 
was followed by nineteen cheers, and the band played Yankee 
Doodle. 

Probably the most significant and effective of these 
protesting meetings was one at which Thomas H. Benton 
presented the resolutions. These resolutions were in the form 
of an ultimatum to Congress. They were passed upon by 
William C. Carr, Henry S. Geyer, Edward Bates, Joshua 
Barton before being adopted unanimously. Alexander Mc- 
Nair presided at the meeting. David Barton was secretary. 
This, then, was the action of the men who were to be the first 
Governor and the first two Senators and the acknowledged 
leaders in the new State. The resolutions declared "that the 
Congress of the United States have no right to control the 



254 MISSOURI HISTORICAL REVIEW. 

provisions of a state constitution, except to preserve its 
republican character." They denounced the action of the 
House of Representatives as "an outrage on the principles 
of the American constitution." But the concluding resolu- 
tion presented to Congress and the rest of the country a start- 
ling situation : 

"That the people of this territory have a right to meet 
in convention by their own authority, and to form a consti- 
tution and state government, whenever they shall deem it 
expedient to do so, and that a second determination on the 
part of Congress to refuse them admission, upon an equal 
footing with the original States, will make it expedient to 
exercise that right." 

There might be Missouri compromises in Congress. 
There was to be no Missouri compromise in Missouri. 

The threats were not few that if Congress persisted in 
tying strings to Missouri's admission, the people of the terri- 
tory might reject the terms and set up independent govern- 
ment for themselves. 

A meeting at St. Ferdinand, where according to tradition 
was the earliest settlement of Americans in Missouri, by two 
or three families from North Carolina, this sentiment was 
proposed : 

"The Territory of Missouri — May she be admitted into 
the Union on an equal footing with the original States, or not 
received in any other way." 

This toast, the reporter of 1819 tells was "drank standing 
up. — Twenty-two cheers." 

Is it any wonder that Thomas Jefferson, growing old and 
perhaps a little querulous, viewed the deadlock in Congress 
and the defiance of the territory with dismal forbodings? 
He wrote to John Adams: "The Missouri question is a breaker 
on which we lose the Missouri country by revolt and what 
more God only knows." Two months later when Congress, 
in spite of Henry Clay's appeals, seemed as far as ever from 
the solution, Mr. Jefferson wrote to Hugh Nelson: "The 
Missouri question is the most portentous which ever threatened 
our Union. In the gloomiest days of the Revolutionary war 



Missouri's centennial. 255 

I never had any apprehensions equal to what I feel from this 
source." 

There were anti-slavery men in Missouri. Emancipa- 
tionists they called themselves, but more frequently restric- 
tionists. But with scarcely an exception they were for the 
settlement of the question by the new State. The Missouri 
Gazette inclined toward the anti-slavery side but the editor, 
Joseph Charless, denounced the proposed restriction by 
Congress as "the most gross and barefaced usurpation that 
has yet been committed." 

"Bear in mind, fellow citizens," he wrote, "that the 
question now before you is not whether slavery shall be per- 
mitted or prohibited in the future State of Missouri, but 
whether we shall meanly abandon our rights and suffer any 
earthly power to dictate the terms of our constitution." 

Scattered in the Missouri settlements were men, not 
many in number, who were not willing to trust the people to 
make their own constitution. They were against statehood 
unless it came with a constitution which would, in time, 
abolish slavery. They did not hold meetings. They did not 
propose toasts. They wrote confidential letters to north- 
ern Congressmen urging them to keep up the fight against 
admission. The effect was to encourage the deadlock, to 
embitter popular sentiment in the territory and to insure the 
election of delegates, when the time came to choose them, 
who were strongly committed to slavery in Missouri. 



While they wrangled over Missouri, the Senate and House 
admitted Alabama. When Congress met in December, 1819, 
the people of Maine were there for admission." Again the 
Missouri question loomed. The conflict went on until March 
when the bill passed permitting Missouri to frame a con- 
stitution without restriction, but providing that slavery 
should be excluded from the rest of the Louisiana Purchase 
territory west and north of Missouri. And that exclusion 
was the Missouri compromise which vexed American politics 
for thirty-seven years, only to be declared unconstitutional 
by the United States Supreme Court in March, 1857. 



256 MISSOURI HISTORICAL REVIEW. 

The compromise measure was put through by parlia- 
mentary legerdemain on the part of Speaker Henry Clay. 
When the House met in the morning, Mr. Randolph moved 
reconsideration of the vote by which the bill had passed the 
day previous. He thought he had votes enough to block 
the compromise of "the doughfaces" as he called them. 
Speaker Clay ruled that Mr. Randolph's motion was out of 
order until the regular morning business was disposed of. 
But, while the morning business was before the House, Mr. 
Clay signed the bill and rushed it by the clerk to the Senate. 
At the close of the morning hour, Mr. Randolph again rose 
and moved the reconsideration. Speaker Clay told him he 
was too late; that the bill was no longer in the possession of 
the House. Mr. Randolph added this to other grievances 
he held against Mr. Clay. The enmity grew until it had its 
climax in the usual form of those days, — a duel. One of the 
finest specimens of news reporting was the account of that 
bloodless meeting written by Thomas H. Benton, as an eye 
witness. Concluding his report, Mr. Benton commented: 

"It was about the last high-toned duel that I have 
witnessed, and among the highest-toned that I have ever 
witnessed, and so happily conducted to a fortunate result 
— a result due to the noble character of the seconds as well 
as to the generous and heroic spirit of the principals." 

When the news of the passage of the Missouri Compro- 
mise bill was received at St. Louis and other centers of popu- 
lation, about the end of March, 1820, Missourians celebrated 
what they firmly believed was the birth of statehood. A 
candle burned in every window on the night chosen for 
formal ratification. The cartoonist of one hundred years 
ago arose to the occasion. He executed a transparency show- 
ing a negro slave dancing in great glee because "Congress 
had voted to permit the slaves to come to live in such a fine 
country as Missouri." The deadlock in Congress had been, 
in large part, the determination of the House of Representa- 
tives to insist on a constitution which would prohibit the 
bringing of any more slaves into Missouri. As the news 



Missouri's centennial. 257 

traveled slowly up the rivers, bonfires burned on the hill- 
tops at night and jollifications were held in the day time. 
Charles J. Cabell told an old settlers' reunion at Keytesville 
in 1877 that he could not remember another day like that 
in his long Missouri lifetime. 

One note of comment showed how determined were the 
Missourians that Congress should not continue to trifle 
with their statehood rights. In the Enquirer, the St. Louis 
paper for which Benton wrote, there appeared a paragraph 
on the 31st of March, 1820, recalling the action of the year 
before and telling what would have been done by the Mis- 
sourians if the passage of the compromise bill had been de- 
layed longer : 

"The people of the United States would have witnessed 
a specimen of Missouri feeling in the indignant contempt 
with which they would have trampled the odious restriction 
under their feet and proceeded to the formation of a Repub- 
lican constitution in the fulness of the people's power." 

If Benton gauged the strength and extent of the Missouri 
sentiment at that time, Missouri may have been nearer the 
formation of an independent republic, to come into the 
Union later, as Texas did, than the historians have told. 
Perhaps Jefferson was correct in his judgment that the 
course of Congress threatened the loss of "the Missouri coun- 
try and what more God only knows." 

But with the passage of the compromise act, Missourians 
proceeded without delay to their part under the enabling 
provisions. They elected delegates, held the convention and 
drafted a constitution. It was all done before the middle of 
June, that year, 1820. There was, however, a rather sig- 
nificant utterance in the declaration of purpose: 

"We the people of Missouri, inhabiting the limits herein- 
after designated, by our representatives in convention assem- 
bled at St. Louis, on Monday, the 12th day of June, 1820, 
do mutually agree to form and establish a free and independent 
republic by the name of 'the State of Missouri.' 

In his valuable book, the textbook of our centennial of 
statehood, Mr. Shoemaker says "Missouri became a State 



258 MISSOURI HISTORICAL REVIEW. 

on Wednesday, July 19, 1820." On that day the constitu- 
tion went into effect. It was accepted without question by 
the entire population. The regular territorial election, if 
Missouri had not been a State, would have been held under 
the former law, on the first Monday of August. It was not 
held. But on the fourth Monday in August, 1820, the State 
of Missouri elected a full complement of state officers, — 
executive, legislative and judicial. And Missouri went on 
doing business as a State from that time forward. When, 
a year later, on the 10th day of August, 1821, President Mon- 
roe issued the belated proclamation that Missouri was a 
State in the Union, it did not cause a ripple of excitement in 
Missouri. The two Senators and the Representative in 
Congress from Missouri had been drawing pay from the 
United States Treasury for nearly a year, although tech- 
nically the act of statehood had not been consummated. 
Sturdy old John Scott, the Representative, the most fluently 
profane man in Missouri, would not permit himself to be 
recognized in Washington as a territorial delegate. He 
demanded the title and the personal consideration of a Mem- 
ber of Congress. Governor McNair thought the incident 
of President Monroe's proclamation should be followed by a 
special session of the legislature and issued the call. There 
was considerable opposition to the governor's action because, 
as people argued, Missouri had been a State more than a 
year and a session of the legislature would be a useless expense. 
The governor had his way and wore his beaver hat, the only 
one seen on that occasion. In his message to the legislature, 
the governor said: 

"Since the organization of this government we have 
exhibited to the American people a spectacle novel and 
peculiar — an American republic on the confines of the federal 
Union, exercising all the powers of sovereign government, 
with no actual political connection with the United States, 
and nothing to bind us to them but a reverence for the same 
principles and an habitual attachment to them and to their 
government." 

Who were the fathers of the State? 



Missouri's centennial. 259 

Here again Mr. Shoemaker has laid Missourians under 
obligations for the very interesting personal data he has as- 
sembled with exhaustive research. The members of the con- 
stitutional convention were forty-one in number. Most of 
them were of English descent, but two were Welsh; two were 
Scotch; four were Irish; four were Scotch-Irish; two were 
French; one was German. 

As regarded nativity, these Founders of Missouri were 
better distributed in respect to the rest of the United States 
than is generally understood. Mr. Shoemaker has learned 
that there were in the convention native sons of Virginia, 
Kentucky, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, North Caro- 
lina, Upper Louisiana under Spanish Dominion, Indiana, 
New York, Vermont, South Carolina, Wales and Ireland. 
While Virginia led in the number, only three of the delegates 
had come directly from that State to settle in Missouri. 
The important and impressive fact is that these forty- one 
fathers of the State represented all sections of the United 
States, as the nation then existed, together with the principal 
countries of Europe. 

That first constitution of Missouri was not submitted to 
popular vote. It went into effect at once. There was noth- 
ing in the enabling act that required submission. The con- 
vention made no provision to have the constitution passed 
upon by vote. The people had named their best men to do 
the work and were satisfied, so well satisfied indeed that the 
organic act endured forty-four years. 



What a history it is that Missourians will review in this 
first one hundred years of statehood! The first Missouri 
question had no sooner been dismissed from national con- 
sideration for a time with President Monroe's proclamation 
than other Missouri questions focused the attention of the 
country upon the Center State. In 1824 Missouri elected 
the President of the United States. John Adams had re- 
ceived only one-third of the popular vote. No candidate 
had a majority of the electors. The election passed to the 



260 MISSOURI HISTORICAL REVIEW. 

House of Representatives to decide, with one vote to be 
cast by each State. Missouri had only one Representative 
to cast her vote. Although Henry Clay, who had put through 
the Missouri Compromise was a candidate, hard-headed John 
Scott, who had the record of having challenged six men in 
one day to fight duels, voted Missouri for the Massachusetts 
man and elected him President. Scott retired to private 
life after that, as was to be expected, but he didn't leave 
Missouri. He carried an assortment of pistols and knives 
and died in his bed at the age of eighty, two months after 
Fort Sumpter was fired on. When he was near the end he 
drew a pistol, flourished it and said: "Show me the man 
that wants to destroy this great government." 

If there is a subject fully as interesting as the State, in 
its relation to this centennial, it is the statemanship of Mis- 
sourians. In every decade of the ten now nearly completed, 
Missourians, politically, have been of national stature and 
influence. The present generation is no exception. Missouri 
has not furnished a President but Missouri has grown Presi- 
dential timber and has had candidates whom the logic of 
political issues should have nominated. Missouri has offered 
a favorite son who nine times received the majority of his 
party in convention. 

In 1903, Walter Williams asked 400 Missourians, repre- 
sentative of all parts of the State and of all vocations, "to 
name the leaders of the State's thought, the men who had 
done the most for Missouri, and through Missourians for the 
world." The living were excluded from consideration, 
properly. The poll showed a range through more than one 
hundred names of honored dead of Missouri. The majority 
vote established this interesting roll of fame: 

Statesmen, — Thomas H. Benton, Francis P. Blair, 
John S. Phelps, B. Gratz Brown, Richard P. Bland, Hamilton 
R. Gamble, James S. Green, Edward Bates. 

Father of the State University, — James S. Rollins. 

Soldiers, — Sterling Price, A. W. Doniphan. 

Engineer, — James B. Eads. 

Preacher, — Enoch Mather Marvin. 



Missouri's centennial. 261 

Poet, — Eugene Field. 

Artist, — George C. Bingham. 

Conditions which govern the placing of effigies of great 
Americans in Statuary Hall, of the Capitol at Washington, 
limit each State to two representatives. Missouri has four 
places. Benton and Blair were placed there in obedience to 
the unanimous sentiment of Missourians. Shields, who made 
his home and was buried in Missouri, won his place by virtue 
of service as a United States Senator from three States and 
as a hero in two wars. The fourth Missourian in Statuary 
Hall is Joseph E. Kenna who, as a Missouri lad of sixteen, 
joined Shelby in 1861. After the war Kenna settled in West 
Virginia and became a United States Senator and a much 
loved citizen of his adopted State. 

Strange to tell. Grant, Sherman, Sheridan and Schofield, 
who in succession received the highest rank in the United 
States army, saw their earliest war service in Missouri, in 
1861. 

A consistent crusade against the rules of the House of 
Representatives, which rules had for generations enabled 
the Speaker and a little oligarchy of "ruling elders" to main- 
tain absolute control of legislation, made one Missourian 
distinguished as a national leader. And when the House 
passed under the control of his party this Missourian was 
chosen Speaker by the unanimous vote of the party caucus, 
an honor without precedent in the history of Congress. 

In both branches of Congress, from the beginning of 
statehood, Missourians have stood for independent thinking 
on public questions. Missouri Senators and Representatives 
have dared to differ frequently with Presidents of their own 
parties. The course of Cockrell and Vest in rebuking execu- 
tive efforts to influence legislation was historic, and it brought 
upon them the commendation rather than the condemnation 
of their Missouri constituents. More recently, within this 
decade, a Missouri Senator has found vindication for his 
insistence upon rigid scrutiny of administration measures. 
Discussing a pending bill he said: "As long as I live I do 
not intend to vest in a board of men the power to do some- 



262 MISSOURI HISTORICAL REVIEW. 

thing of great moment, great sweep and great gravity, when 
I do not entertain a clear idea as to the powers I have granted." 
This is no injection of politics into a discussion of Missouri's 
Centennial. It is simply by way of calling attention to the 
characteristic course of the men Missouri has been sending to 
Congress from the first to the closing decade of the century 
of statehood. "The king can do no wrong" has never had 
place in Missouri sentiment. 

Ten years after the close of the Civil war, a Missourian 
began his stubborn contest in Congress for the plain people. 
Richard P. Bland was the great commoner of his generation. 
It matters not what may have been thought, pro or con, 
of the silver issue when it was pending. It matters not that 
coinage of silver at the ratio of sixteen to one became a past 
issue. Bland's voice was raised in season and out of season 
for what he conceived to be the rights of the American masses. 
Free and unlimited coinage of silver was not with him the 
end. It was only a means to an end. In the Congress 
preceding the one in which began his great career, for it was 
great in the championship of a national issue, silver had been 
demonetized save as a subsidiary metal. Immediately Bland 
began his work, introducing in 1876 his bill for the restoration 
of the double standard. Thenceforward he kept the ques- 
tion to the front until he made it the paramount issue before 
the country in 1896. He talked at every session upon "the 
burden on the people of the West and South." 

"The common people cannot come to this capitol," he 
said. "They are not here in your lobby. They are at home, 
following the plow, cultivating the soil, or working in their 
workshops. It is the silvern and golden slippers of the money 
kings, the bankers and financiers, whose step is heard in the 
lobbies, and these rule the finances of the country. They 
are the men who get access to your committees, and have 
ruled and controlled the legislation of the country for their 
own interests. If the constituents of those who are opposing 
this measure could look down from the galleries upon them, 
they would sink in their seats with shame for the course they 
are pursuing, because it is adverse to the interests of the 
people." 



Missouri's centennial. 263 

And when, in 1893, a Democratic President, called Con- 
gress in special session to repeal the silver purchasing act, 
Bland stood forth against the President of his own party 
in a speech which became historic as the "parting-of-the- 
ways." 

"Speaking as a Democrat, all my life battling for what 
I conceived to be Democracy and what I conceived to be 
right, I am yet an American above Democracy. I do not 
intend, we do not intend, that any party shall survive, if 
we can help it, that will lay the confiscating hand upon 
Americans in the interests of England or of Europe. Now 
mark it. This may be strong language, but heed it. The 
people mean it, and, my friends of the eastern Democracy, 
we bid you farewell when you do this thing." 

Three years later Bland led on several ballots as the 
candidate of the West for the Presidential nomination. He 
was not nominated but Missourians will always believe he 
was the logical candidate. Students of history will some- 
time trace in the career of this Missouri commoner influence 
of no small importance in the evolution of government for 
the American people. Bland, like so many Missourians 
who preceded and followed him in Congress, had not only 
courage of conviction but the mental power for leadership. 
Whether Missourians of today commend or condemn the 
judgment of these statesmen in specific acts, they all can 
glory in the boldness and masterfulness of the records made 
in national legislation. 



Missouri has been the mother of States. Missouri may 
well call upon her children to join in the coming celebration 
of the centennial of statehood. The original Missouri Terri- 
tory has been divided into twelve States. From the region 
which lay beyond the western border of the Louisiana Pur- 
chase have been created eight more States, twenty in all. 
In the making of these twenty States, Missourians have 
had no small part. Thirty years ago an omnibus enabling 
act brought into the Union four States at one time — North 
and South Dakota, Montana and Washington. The staff 



264 MISSOURI HISTORICAL REVIEW. 

correspondent of a Missouri newspaper made a trip through 
the about-to-be States. In every one of the four constitu- 
tional conventions, then sitting simultaneously, were former 
Missourians performing important functions in the drafting, 
of the organic acts. The membership of the constitutional 
convention of Washington included no fewer than ten former 
Missourians. California was for years called a colony of 
Missouri. When John C. Fremont, the Pathfinder, started 
across the plains with the historic expedition which was fol- 
lowed by the addition of California to geographical union 
with the United States, the order sent from Washington in- 
structed him not to take cannon. Jessie Benton Fremont, 
in St. Louis, withheld the stipulation about the cannon and 
did not allow it to reach her husband. Fremont went on, 
equipped for forcible conquest, if necessary, and the moral 
effect, supported by the presence of Missourians, determined 
the status of California as American territory. 

"The Father of Oregon" was the title conferred upon a 
United States Senator from Missouri, Lewis Fields Linn. 
As early as 1837 Dr. Linn introduced and pushed the bill 
authorizing the American occupation of the Columbia river 
and the establishment of Oregon -Territory. He became 
chairman of the committee put in charge of the bill and took 
the leadership of a five years' struggle, which ended in the 
success of the measure shortly after Dr. Linn's death. Benton 
was for war with Great Britain, if necessary, to save the great 
northwest to the United States when the international dis- 
pute over the boundary became irritating. He stood in the 
Senate for the policy that the United States should occupy 
and hold all of the disputed territory. He offered to take 
10,000 Missourians and settle the trouble with Great Britain 
in sixty days. 

In this wholesale winning of the West, Missourians were 
everywhere and foremost. They were the founders of a 
hundred cities beyond the borders of their own State. They 
were factors in the making of many States. 



Missouri's centennial. 265 

"The magnificent valley of the Mississippi is ours, with 
all its fountains, springs and floods, and woe to the states- 
man who shall undertake to surrender one drop of its water 
or one inch of its soil to any foreign power." This was 
Benton's defi to Great Britain in the northern boundary 
controversy. Between sessions of Congress, Benton, at his 
home in Missouri, assembled all possible information about 
the Northwest. He invited the fur traders, the Indian 
agents and the army officers to his house and made himself 
their friend, while he drew from them facts and impressions 
about the disputed territory. When he returned to Wash- 
ington for successive sessions of Congress he was prepared 
with fresh material to discuss the boundary issue and to 
insist that the United States stand firmly against British 
aggression. 

Benton was the original conservationist of the West. 
He wanted the government domain opened to white settle- 
ment and fought the then prevailing policy of the govern- 
ment under which these lands were sold to the highest bidders 
and passed into the hands of speculators. To Benton was 
due largely the change of policy by which government land 
passed at $1.25 an acre to actual settlers. Benton towered 
in the Senate thirty years, the first to serve for that length 
of time, mighty in debate, powerfully constructive in law- 
making for the building up of the West, a rare combination 
of qualities. 

Atchison, several times president-pro- tern of the United 
States Senate, filled an hiatus when Sunday came between the 
expiration of one Presidential term and the beginning of 
another. During a visit made to his home in 1883, he was 
asked how he felt being President of the United States for 
a day. He replied: "As well as I can remember now, I 
went to bed and slept. The session had just closed and I 
had been up nights." 

John S. Phelps, eleven years at the head of the Ways 
and Means committee of the House of Representatives, was 
in direct succession for the Speakership. He was side- 
tracked because, as they explained, the southern Congress- 

H R— 2 



266 MISSOURI HISTORICAL REVIEW. 

men were apprehensive that the Missourian might not do 
just as their wing of the party desired. 

John B. Clark opposed John Sherman and, almost single- 
handed, kept him out of the Speakership just before the war. 
Democratic editors followed the parliamentary battle ad- 
miringly and said, editorially, "Here is a Missourian big 
enough to be nominated for the Presidency." 

James S, Green, by the word of James G. Blaine, was the 
best man on his feet in the United States Senate about 1858. 

Then came the Blairs who had more influence than any 
other two men with Lincoln, making effective the conservative 
"Border States* policy" which saved this nation from dis- 
union. 

Under the earliest organization of the State, every Mis- 
sourian from eighteen to forty-five was enrolled and did 
military service, not much of it but enough to realize the duty 
he owed with his citizenship. There was preparedness. And 
when the Mexican war came, 6,000 Missourians went to it, 
more than from any other State except Kentucky and Louisi- 
ana. Some of those Missourians went by river, without 
waiting for orders, to reinforce old "Rough and Ready" 
Zachary Taylor. The others marched with Doniphan in 
that wonderful American Anabasis. When President Lincoln 
saw Doniphan at the White House in 1861, he said: 

"And this is Colonel Doniphan, who made the wild 
march against the Comanches and the Mexicans. You are 
the only man I ever met whose appearance came up to my 
expectations." 

An Iowa author has chosen the exodus of the Mormons 
from Missouri as the subject for a book. 

"The people of Missouri, 

Like a whirlwind in its fury, 

And without a judge and jury, 

Drove the saints and spilled their blood." 

So ran the version of the exodus as told by a Mormon 
poet. Let it be hoped that whoever writes of the Mormon 
war as a chapter in Missouri history will not overlook what 
saved the lives of Joseph Smith and the other leaders after 



Missouri's centennial. 267 

the surrender at Far West. As the result of a council of the 
principal officers of the Missouri troops, the general command- 
ing sent this order to Doniphan: 

"You will take Joseph Smith and other prisoners to the 
public square of Far West and shoot them at nine o'clock to- 
morrow morning." 

To this Doniphan replied : 

"It is cold blooded murder. I will not obey your order. 
My brigade shall march for Liberty tomorrow morning at 
eight o'clock; and if you execute those men I will hold you 
personally responsible before an earthly tribunal, so help me 
God!" 

There was no execution. Doniphan was not court- 
martialed. Missouri was saved from a stain. In politics, in 
war and in every position of trial the courage of conviction 
has been characteristic of the Missourian. 

After Doniphan's Expedition had added New Mexico to 
the United States, a Missourian, William Carr Lane, eight 
times mayor of St. Louis, was sent out there to be territorial 
governor. There was some talk that the Franklin Pierce 
administration might let go of part of the territory, especially 
the fertile Mesilla Valley which the Mexicans wanted much 
to retain. Lane said it should not be done and it was not 
done. Missourians sang: 

"In sunshine and storm, in censure and praise, 

Long Live Governor Lane. 

He speaks what he thinks and he means what he says. 

Viva Governor Lane! 

No tricks, nor no bribes, nor no silly blunder 

Shall steal our worthy governor's thunder, 

We'll stand at his back till the day we go under, 

Long live Governor Lane!" 



The Mexican war was not the baptism of blood for the 
Missourians. Earlier than that Gentry had gone with the 
Missouri rangers to the Everglades of Florida at the request 
of President Van Buren to punish the Seminoles. 



268 MISSOURI HISTORICAL REVIEW. 

But Still earlier the hearts courageous of the men who 
were to form the new commonwealth had been shown to the 
far-reaching gain of the whole United States. For reasons 
other than population, other than the treaty stipulation, 
Missouri deserved better treatment than was accorded by 
the United States Congress to the petitions for statehood. 
The War of 1812 was declared in June of that year. The 
same month Congress created the Territory of Missouri, 
giving name and government to 20,000 people and putting 
upon them the responsibility of defense of the long north- 
western frontier. In early American history there is no 
better chapter on preparedness than the account those Mis- 
sourians gave of themselves. Long before a gun was fired, 
British influence was at work among the tribes from the 
Great Lakes to the Missouri river. St. Louis fur traders 
knew it. In 1811 they sent word down the river to St. Louis 
"the wampum is being carried along the banks of the Mis- 
souri." The British scheme was "a universal confederacy" 
of the Indian nations in the northwest to overwhelm the 
American settlements in Missouri and Illinois as soon as the 
expected war came. Guns and ammunition were distributed 
freely to the Indians at the British posts. 

Kentucky and Tennessee sent word to their Missouri 
kindred offering help to defend the border. Missourians 
replied that they could take care of themselves, and they 
did. Five regiments of Missourians were organized in 1812 
for home defense. The next year two more regiments were 
formed. Indians came down from the north and were driven 
back. Every settlement had its fort. Men in squads went 
to their fields and carried their guns while they plowed. 
When Governor Howard suggested that these Missouri 
pioneers come nearer St. Louis for protection until the war 
was over, the messenger carried back this reply from Captain 
Sarshall Cooper, commanding at Boone's Lick: 

"We have maid our hoams here & all we hav is here & 
it wud ruen us to Leave now. We be all good Americans, 
not a Tory or one of his Pups among us & we hav 2 hundred 



Missouri's centennial. 269 

Men and Boys that will Fight to the last & we hav 100 Wimen 
Girls that will tak there places wh. makes a good force. 
So we can Defend this Settlement wh. with Gods Help we 
will do. So if we had a fiew barls of Powder and 2 hundred 
Lead is all we ask." 

The fighting line was pushed northward. Fifteen hun- 
dred Missouri rangers rode up the Mississippi Valley on the 
Missouri side, swam their horses across the river near Fort 
Mason and marched through Illinois, driving the Indians 
before them. They camped at Lake Peoria and built Fort 
Clark. One column went to the northwestern corner of 
Illinois. Another went up the Illinois river toward Lake 
Michigan. Defeat of the British plan to overwhelm Mis- 
souri and Illinois settlements was complete. When the war 
was ended, Missourians were just ready to begin. They had 
not only mobilized their own fighting strength but they had 
forty Indian chiefs with thousand of warriors to go against 
the British and their red allies about the Great Lakes. 

These were the Missourians to whom Congress three 
years later denied statehood except with conditions such as 
had been imposed upon no other State. 

After organizing the Indian hostilities all along the 
western and northwestern borders of the United States for 
the war of 1812, the British government, when peace came 
under the treaty of Ghent, imposed upon the United States 
the responsibility of restoring tranquility among the Indian 
nations in the West. This was accomplished by Missourians 
at the great council held at Portage des Sioux in 1815. The 
chiefs and head men came from a hundred tribes. They 
camped at the crossing just above the junction of the Missis- 
sippi and Missouri rivers. They listened to the orations of 
the Missourians, smoked the pipe of peace and paddled 
away to their camps hundreds of miles up the Illinois, the 
Mississippi, the Missouri and their tributaries. 

There is nothing finer in the long and bloody history of 
the relations between white man and red man of America 
than the policy of the French habitants of Missouri toward 
the tribes. Auguste Chouteau, the boy who had led "the 



270 MISSOURI HISTORICAL REVIEW. 

first thirty" to the building of St. Louis, was the historic 
figure in the Portage des Sioux council. He voiced that 
poHcy which had secured for St. Louis fifty years of harmony 
with the Indians, broken only once when British agents 
planned and inspired an attack in 1780. 

"Put in your minds," said Auguste Chouteau, at the 
Portage des Sioux council, using the figurative speech so 
attractive to the Indian mind, "that as soon as the British 
made peace with us, they left you in the middle of the prairie 
without a shade or cover against the sun and rain. The 
British left you positively in the middle of the prairie, worthy 
of pity. But we Americans have a large umbrella which 
covers us against the sun and rain and we ofTer you, as friends, 
a share of it." 

From the cliff of Herculaneum, below St. Louis was 
dropped Missouri lead which made buckshot and ball for the 
War of 1812, The maker was a Frenchman who had been 
imprisoned in the Bastile for his republican sentiments and 
who had come to Missouri to live. He went to New Orleans 
with his ammunition for Andrew Jackson's army. He was 
there when the battle was fought, with disaster to Packen- 
ham. He sent the news, by slow mail of course, to St. Louis. 
The letter was made public as soon as received. That night 
the liberty loving French Missourians and the patriotic 
American Missourians burned candles in all of the windows 
of the town, "in honor of the brilliant success of the American 
arms at New Orleans," as the Gazette, the only newspaper 
printed west of the Mississippi, said. 



Even earlier than the War of 1812 and the transfer of 
sovereignty of the Louisiana Province to the United States 
there was sympathy of the most practical kind with the 
patriots of the Atlantic seaboard in the war for independence. 
An Episcopal bishop of Missouri, — Robertson, — delving in 
colonial history, found one of the most interesting chapters 
for the history of that period in the material support which 
the French settlers of St. Louis and Ste. Genevieve extended 
to George Rogers Clark and the Virginians in the conquest 



Missouri's centennial. 271 

of the Northwest Territory. Missouri lead was carried, 
surreptitiously but none the less effectively, to Washington's 
army. The French lead miners and traders shipped the lead 
in pirogues down the Mississippi to be delivered, ostensibly' 
in New Orleans. But below the mouth of the Ohio the 
pirogues were found floating keel upward, as the tradition 
goes. It was given out that river pirates had captured the 
cargoes. Long afterward tradition told that the Missouri 
lead was transhipped at the mouth of the Ohio and paddled 
up that stream to headwaters for transport across the moun- 
tains to the American army. 

Bishop Robertson told the story of Francis Vigo. Here 
was a Missouri patriot who so served the American cause at 
the time of the Revolution, that Robertson said of him: 

"It was only by such aid that Colonel Clark (George 
Rogers) was enabled to maintain the posts which he had 
conquered on the Wabash and the Mississippi until the close 
of the war (Revolutionary), by which he saved to the nation 
the vast territory lying between the Ohio and the Lakes. 
Few others have done more to shape the fortunes of the 
West." 

Vigo was an Italian by birth, Spanish by allegiance. 
He lived in St. Louis and traded with the Indians along the 
Missouri, amassing considerable means. He risked his life 
to carry to George Rogers Clark information of conditions 
at Vincennes which enabled Clark to capture that post vital to 
British control of what is now Indiana. He gave of his 
means to furnish Clark with supplies for that memorable 
expedition from Kaskaskia, so graphically described by a 
Missourian, Churchill. The end of the Revolutionary war 
found Vigo well nigh impoverished, with $20,000 of worthless 
continental money. Vigo died before the new nation redeemed 
the money. 

When Missouri's Centennial is celebrated, may it not 
be forgotten that back as far as 1776 those first white Mis- 
sourians had no insignificant part in the achievement of 
American independence. Those liberty-loving Missourians 
were under a flag at peace with Great Britain but their sympa- 



272 MISSOURI HISTORICAL REVIEW. 

thy with the American cause prompted them to patriotic 
action. 

The British knew this at the time. Their official records 
furnish the evidence. They planned carefully the "reduction 
of Pencur," (St. Louis) by surprise. They sent their own 
redcoats, with Indian allies armed and fed to make the at- 
tack. They meant to capture, St. Louis, Ste. Genevieve and 
all of the settlements, and gain the country west of the Mis- 
sissippi to Great Britain, with "the rich fur trade of the Mis- 
souri river." The aid and sympathy which the habitants 
were giving the American "rebels" furnished the excuse. 
Canadian archives still preserved tell the motive and history 
of this expedition to capture the Missouri country for Great 
Britain. They tell of the discovery of lead loaded on batteaux 
to go to the American "rebels." They give in detail the ac- 
count of the attack upon St. Louis in 1780 and lament the 
repulse of the British. But they find consolation in such 
fruits of the expedition as "many hundreds of cattle were 
destroyed and forty-three scalps were brought in." 

The next year the Missourians struck back. Captain 
Beausoleil, with sixty-five white men and about as many 
Indians, marched from St. Louis on the 2nd of January over 
the prairies of Illinois, passed around the head of Lake Michi- 
gan, and surprised the British post of St. Joseph. With the 
contents of the post Beausoleil bought his way through the 
country of the British Indian allies and got back to St. Louis 
bringing the British flag. 

American history of the Revolutionary period, in its 
far-reaching results, is not limited to the fighting along the 
Atlantic seaboard as the books written by the students of that 
section might lead the reader to suppose. 



In the garb of a national issue, Missouri was received 
into the Union. When Robert M. Stewart was governor, 
in the term preceding 1861, he described Missouri as "a 
peninsula of slavery running out into a sea of freedom." 

Champ Clark once said: "Missouri has been the stormy 
petrel of American politics. The richest, the most imperial 



Missouri's centennial. 273 

commonwealth in the Union, her geographical position placed 
her in the thick of the fight. The most serious trouble on 
the slavery question came with her admission into the Union, 
and the second over the admission of California, — a Missouri 
colony. Most people date hostilities from Sumter, April, 
1861. As a matter of fact, Missouri and Kansas had been 
carrying on a civil war on their own hook for five or six years 
before the first gun was fired in Charleston harbor. If Sir 
Walter Scott had lived in that day," Champ Clark concluded, 
"he could have found material for fifty novels descriptive of 
border warfare in the forays and exploits of the Missourians 
and Kansans before the first soldier was legally mustered into 
the service of either army." 

For forty years Missouri was this "stormy petrel" while 
the issue of slavery grew into an impending crisis. Within 
that period the growth of population, of trade, of develop- 
ment in resources, and in culture was marvelous. Before the 
war Missouri had fifty-two institutions of higher education. 
Missouri ranked, in population, twenty-third of the States 
when admitted to the Union. In ten years the State ad- 
vanced to twenty-first place. In 1840, Missouri was six- 
teenth. In 1850, the State was thirteenth. In 1870, Mis- 
souri reached fifth place. 

A battle, according to the Civil war definition, was an 
engagement in which ten or more soldiers were killed or 
wounded. Of the 2,261 battles of the Civil war, 244, more 
than one-tenth, were in Missouri. This State is credited 
with having sent 109,000 men into the Union armies. This 
was a number larger than any of the other States except 
New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana and Massa- 
chusetts. Price took 5,000 Missourians with him east of the 
Mississippi river in April, 1862, and with Missourians already 
there formed the 1st and 2nd Missouri Confederate brigades, 
numbering 10,000 men. These Missouri Confederates fought 
their last battle the day that Lee surrendered. They had 
been reduced to 400 men. General James Harding esti- 
mated the Missourians who fought in Confederate armies 
west of the Mississippi at 16,800, forming six regiments of 



274 MISSOURI HISTORICAL REVIEW. 

infantry, ten of cavalry and eight batteries. With all of the 
recruits added from time to time, the Missourians who 
fought outside of their own State for the Confederacy num- 
bered more than 30,000. Thus it appears that 139,000 Mis- 
sourians went into either the Union or the Confederate 
armies. These 139,000 Missouri fighters were fourteen per 
cent of the entire population of the State, or sixty per cent 
of all within military age. The mortality was estimated at 
25,885. Is there any other state record of the Civil war to 
compare with this! 

Missourians faced Missourians on scores of battlefields. 
When the commission appointed to mark the lines and to 
erect a monument at Vicksburg consulted the records they 
were amazed at the extent of Missouri's participation. On 
the Union side at Vicksburg, Missouri was represented by 
twenty-five organizations and on the Confederate side by 
seventeen. But while Missourians fought valiantly every- 
where for what they believed to be right, the war was at its 
worst within the State. "In Missouri," said Champ Clark, 
"the war was waged with unspeakable bitterness, some- 
times with inhuman cruelty. It was fought by men in single 
combat, in squads, in companies, in regiments, in great 
armies, in the open, in fortified town, and in ambush, under 
the Stars and Stripes, under the Stars and Bars, and under 
the black flag." 

Unpreparedness was the state of the Union when the 
Civil war came. Men could be enlisted. Guns and uni- 
forms could be bought. Cartridges could be made. The fight- 
ing began as if no thereafter was taken into consideration. 
Back from the front trickled the first streams of wounded 
and sick. They swelled rapidly. From Wilson's Creek in 
mid-August of 1861 were brought to St. Louis 721 wounded 
men. In all of the city there were not hospital accommoda- 
tions for so many. The Western Sanitary Commission was 
born of great emergency. And its birthplace and earliest 
development was in Missouri. There was the emergency. 
Where was the man? He was found, southern by birth, of 
Tennessee, Missourian by twenty years of business activity, 



Missouri's centennial. 275 

James E. Yeatman. "Old Sanitary" he became known in a 
thousand circHng camps. Other Missourians held up his 
hands, but James E. Yeatman was the master mind of the 
Western Sanitary Commission which took care of the thou- 
sands of wounded, organized relief for the multitudes of 
refugees. Missouri, the State, St. Louis, the city and Mis- 
sourians by thousands contributed to the funds which the 
Commission expended. The organization became the model 
for the whole country. When the war ended it appeared that 
this Commission born in Missouri, managed by Missourians, 
had expended the enormous sum of $4,270,098.55, in money 
and stores for the relief of the suffering caused by the war. 

At the close of the Civil war, in 1865, Missouri had a 
debt of $36,094,908. Missouri's property losses directly from 
the war were many millions, not counting the values of the 
slaves. In 1860, the taxable wealth of the State was $500,- 
000,000. In 1868, after the State had had three years of 
recuperation, the taxable wealth was $46,000,000 less than 
it was at the beginning of the war. 

The incidents, the details of the conflict within the State, 
from 1861 to 1865, were almost incredible. They are shocking 
to this generation. But recalling of those terrible experi- 
ences in connection with this coming celebration of one hun- 
dred years of statehood will be well justified by the record 
of what followed the war in Missouri. Almost as quickly 
as the storm of strife burst in 1861, came the calm of peace 
and recuperation and the restoration of law and order among 
Missourians in 1865. Nowhere else along the border, no- 
where else in the country, were the wounds healed, the scars 
removed as rapidly as in Missouri. 

Missourians, in the fullest sense, accepted the results of 
arms. The patriotic sentiments expressed by the returning 
Confederates in the gathering at old Roanoke in Chariton 
deserve a place in the history of Missouri. 

Standing beside the statues of the two great Missouri 
Unionists, Benton and Blair, in Statuary Hall, of the Capitol 
at Washington, Vest, who had been on the opposite side in 



276 MISSOURI HISTORICAL REVIEW 

the issue of the rights of the States, who had been a Con- 
federate Senator, said: 

"These men sleep together in Missouri soil almost side 
by side, and so long as this Capitol shall stand, or this nation 
exist, these statues will be eloquent although silent pledges 
of Missouri's eternal allegiance to an eternal Union." 



Missouri has an acre of water to every hundred acres of 
soil. This is surface, running water. Missouri has few 
lakes, almost no stagnant water. Account is not taken of 
the amazing underground water courses and veins every- 
where which insure the potable supply. 

Missouri has water for transportation. The entire 
eastern frontage and half of the western frontage is on nav- 
igable water. The State is bisected by navigable water. 
When the time comes for the return to these natural routes 
of transportation in the fullness of their possibilities, Mis- 
sourians will realize more than they did in the first century 
what these advantages mean. 

Missouri has water for power. No other State, perhaps 
no other country, presents conditions so encouraging to the 
coming energy, — hydro-electric. "Water power," said Has- 
well, the modern historian of the Ozarks, "more of it, twice 
over, than has made the six stony New England States the 
richest of the nation. Not only so, but with a far greater 
variety of uses for it than New England has, or ever had. 
Water powers so situated, some of them, as to be susceptible 
of developing without so much as a dam." Mr. Haswell 
has in mind the numerous bends and curves which, cut 
through, will give a mill race with almost incalculable force 
for the turbines. 

Missouri has water for medicine. The spas awaiting the 
certain development in time, and of endless variety in con- 
stituents, — a hundred kinds of mineral waters in one small 
circumscribed area. 

And then think of the aesthetic meaning! Charlevoix, 
traversing continents before the settlement, saw the union of 
the Missouri and the Mississippi, and said of it: 



Missouri's centennial. 277 

"I believe this is the finest confluence in the world. 
The two rivers are much of the same breadth, each about 
half a league, but the Missouri is by far the most rapid, and 
seems to enter the Mississippi like a conqueror, through 
which it carries its white waves to the opposite shore without 
mixing them. Afterwards it gives its color to the Mississippi, 
which it never loses again, but carries quite down to the sea." 

Before Missouri's first century was two-thirds completed, 
an eminent lawyer, who yielded occasionally to the muse, 
dedicated these lines to — 

TWO ANCIENT MISSES 

I know two ancient misses 

Who ever onward go. 

From a cold and frigid northern clime, 

Through a land of wheat and corn and wine, 

To the southern sea where the fig and the lime, 

And the golden orange grow. 

In graceful curves they wind about 

Upon their long and lonely route 

Among the beauteous hills; 

They never cease their onward step. 

Though day and night they're dripping wet, 

And oft with sleet and snow beset, 

And sometimes with the chills. 

The one is a romping, dark brunette, 
As fickle and gay as any coquette; 
She glides along by the western plains, 
And changes her bed each time it rains; 
Witching as any dark-eyed houri, 
Tkis romping, wild brunette, Missouri. 

The other is placid, mild and fair. 
With a gentle, sylph-like, quiet air, 
And voice as sweet as soft guitar, 
She moves along the vales and parks, 
Where Naiads play Aeolian harps — 
Nor ever goes by fits and starts — 
No fickle coquette of the city, 
But gentle, consistent Mississippi. 



278 MISSOURI HISTORICAL REVIEW. 

I love the wild and dark brunette, 
Because she is a gay coquette; 
Her, too, I love, of quiet air, 
Because she's gentle, true and fair; 
Land of my birth! The east and west 
Embraced by these is doubly blest — 
'Tis hard to tell which I love best. 



A theme to their liking the pageant masters of the Mis- 
souri Centennial will find in the pioneer days; when the 
Armstrong mill, turned with the strong arm, kept the meal 
bag supplied; when the Missourians, as they founded their 
new homes sang: 

"Our cabins are made of logs of wood. 
The floors are made of puncheon. 
The roof is held by weighted poles 
And then we 'hang off' for luncheon." 

Commerce meant the construction of "longhorns," as 
the flatboats of Cottonwood logs were called, to float the 
cured hog meat and other products down the Missouri and 
the Mississippi to the St. Louis market. 

The hunting tales are innumerable. Five bears killed 
within what are the limits of the City of Boonville! One 
man killed twenty-two bears in three days in the Missouri 
bottoms. To go out and get three deer before breakfast 
was not extraordinary with those Missouri nimrods. In 
Montgomery county the deer were so plentiful one winter 
that according to the traditions one man killed forty-five 
in a single day. Daniel Boone is credited with having said 
Missouri was such good country for game that he felt it was 
time to move when he couldn't kill a deer from his front 
door. 

They sang in their joy of living, those early Missourians, 
such ballads as Barbara Allen and My Pretty Little Ben. 
Another favorite was: 

"John, John, the piper's son. 
He married me when I was young; 
We journeyed toward the setting sun. 
Over the hills and far away." 



Missouri's centennial. 279 

Then came the excitement over the discovery of gold in 
CaHfornia. Missouri was the highway of the argonauts. 
Judge D. C. Allen has told how when he was a boy they 
marched through Liberty, then the largest, farthest west 
community of Missouri. And as they passed through Liberty, 
disappearing over the hills, the unending refrain was: 

"Oh California! That is the land for me, 

I'm bound for Sacramento with my washbowl onto me." 

The washbowl was the inevitable part of the equipment, for 
placer mining was the only way of getting out the "yellow 
boys" of that time. 

The first steamboat was thirteen days plowing the Mis- 
souri from St. Louis to Old Franklin in Howard county. 
But before the treacherous banks destroyed Old Franklin's 
hopes of metropolitan greatness as many as forty boats 
passed there in a single day. There were the Hudson and 
the Brandywine of which Judge Allen says, the song ran: 

"The Hudson is a bully boat. 

She runs very fine, 

But she can't raise steam enough 

To beat the Brandywine. 

The captain's on the pilot deck. 

Snorting very loud. 

And the ladies think 

It's thunder in the cloud." 



In what other part of the Union can be found the counter- 
part of Missouri's Ozarks? Some twenty years ago, a thought- 
ful man stood before the great map of the United States 
and said: 

"As it appears to me, there are just three places left in 
this country where a man with a little can go and have almost 
the absolute certainty of making a great deal. I mean we 
have three sections which seem to have been passed by while 
the rest of the country was being occupied, and to which at 
some time in the not distant future there is going to be an 
influx of population and capital. One of these sections is 
that southwestern corner of Texas between the Rio Grande 



280 MISSOURI HISTORICAL REVIEW. 

and the Gulf of Mexico. I don't know much about it; was 
never there, but if the question of moisture can be answered 
that strip is going to be a great place for early vegetable 
and fruit culture. Another place is the Indian Territory. 
Of course it will be necessary to await the action of the gov- 
ernment in opening the reservations, which cannot be de- 
layed much longer. The third and largest of these sections 
and the one which I would choose if I was going somewhere 
'to grow up with the country' is right there." 

The thoughtful man pointed to the Ozark country of 
Missouri. He had never been there but he noted that the 
railroad builders of the South and West had rushed by and 
had left a great block of the oldest part of the American conti- 
nent undeveloped. The twenty years that have passed 
since this study of the map have witnessed the transforma- 
tion of the Indian reservations into a State. Southwest 
Texas has come into its own. And now, as the centennial 
year approaches, the long overlooked Ozarks promise to 
focus attention of the fruit raisers, the dairymen, the chicken 
farmers and the seekers of ideal refuge from the summer 
heat of the cities. 

A strange combination of old and new the Ozark country 
presents. One meets a man who has just come from the 
North and is enthusiastic over the healthful home he has 
acquired at small cost. The next acquaintance may be a 
native whose family, back to his grandfather, has lived right 
there. The Ozark country was settled before the Missouri 
Valley was. The oldest town in Missouri is out in the Ozark 
country. Pioneers found their way into the Ozarks long 
before Missouri was a State. They discovered the valleys, 
and the salubrity of the climate, and they made homes on 
the slopes and plateaus while Iowa was still Indian country. 
Descendants of these pioneers live there today, and now, a 
century after those early settlers came, the Ozark country 
is so sparsely occupied that there are stretches of virgin forest 
where the deer graze and the turkeys roost. Legends and 
landmarks abound in the Ozarks. One of the richest fields 
of folklore is found there. Just a mere beginning of the 
possible literature of the Ozarks has been made. 



Missouri's centennial. 281 

"Missouri," said Champ Clark, "is proud of her immeasur- 
able physical resources, which will one day make her facile 
princeps among her sisters; but there is something else of 
which she is prouder still, and that is her splendid citizen- 
ship, consisting at this day of nearly 4,000,000 industrious, 
intelligent, patriotic, progressive, law-abiding. God-fearing 
people." 

In 1910 Missouri had, in round numbers, 3,300,000 
people of whom only 230,000 were of foreign birth. Missouri 
is producing the typical American. With all of the exodus 
of the generations to build up the West, the native stock is 
still notably strong. According to the latest government 
census Missourians by birth are 72 per cent of the population. 
From other parts of the Union have gravitated to Missouri 
840,131 natives of other States finding Missouri more at- 
tractive for homes than their own commonwealths. And yet 
three of every quartet of Missourians were born in Missouri. 
Illinois has sent 186,611 of her sons and daughters to become 
Missourians. Kentucky, Kansas, Ohio, Tennessee, Indiana 
and Iowa, each has contributed over 50,000 of their natives 
to become adopted Missourians. From the four points of 
the American compass, from every State in the Union have 
come these elements to help make the typical American. 

Champ Clark once commented humorously upon the 
political disturbance which followed backward waves of 
migration from the West into Missouri. That was in the 
past days of grasshoppers and drought. A Missouri ballad 
ran in hospitable strain: 

"Come join in the chorus and sing its fame, 
You poor lonely settler that's stuck on a claim. 
'Farewell to this country; farewell to the West! 
I'll travel back east to the girl I love best. 
I'll stop in Missouri and get me a wife, 
And live on corn dodger the rest of my life.' " 

Lizzie Chambers Hull, in her Song of Missouri, which won 
the award of the most fitting a few years ago, embodied this 
idea of Missouri hospitality and welcome: 

H— 3 



282 MISSOURI HISTORICAL REVIEW. 

"She came a compromise for peace; 

Her prayer is still that strife may cease; 

She mourned her blue, wept o'er her gray, 

When side by side, in death they lay — 

Missouri. 

"Nor North, nor South, nor East, nor West, 

But part of each — of each the best. 

Come homeless one, come to her call; 

Her arms are stretched to shelter all — 

Missouri." 



"Parsimony in education is liberality in crime," said one 
governor of Missouri, Crittenden, in his inaugural address. 

What State can show four educators who did more than 
William T. Harris and James M. Greenwood for grade and 
high schools; than Calvin M. Woodward, the pioneer in 
manual training which won him and his State international 
renown; than Miss Susie T. Blow, content to be the mother 
of the kindergarten in the United States? 

Missouri led in co-education with Christian University 
as early as 1851. Normal teaching by the State will observe 
its semi-centennial only a year after the centennial of state- 
hood. 

It is tradition that when James S. Rollins had secured 
the foundation and when John Hiram Lathrop was about to 
begin the organization of the University of Missouri, a man 
who could not read or write at that time subscribed $3,000 
toward the fund to put the institution in practical operation. 
True or not, the tradition is believable of a Missourian, for 
the passion to acquire education has been among Missourians 
through all time, even from before those winter months when 
Riddick rode his horse from St. Louis to Washington to 
get Congress to set aside public lands in Missouri for public 
school purposes. A poor boy who began business life in a 
country store reached the Missouri Legislature and framed a 
bill for the establishment of a college which should neither 
teach politics nor impose distinction of religious creed. That 
institution has achieved an endowment and property repre- 
senting $15,000,000, not a dollar of which has come from the 
United States, the State of Missouri or the City of St. Louis. 



Missouri's centennial. 283 

Washington University has been built with the offerings of 
men, the great majority of whom never had the advantages 
of higher education. Just a century ago promoters founded 
what they hoped was destined to be a great city near the 
center of the State and in their attractive Hterature held out 
the inducement that an academy would be established at 
once under the management of a distinguished educator. 
They knew the Missourians. 

In the early summer of 1917, the beginning of Missouri's 
centennial period, the planners of cities will come from all 
parts of this country and Canada to observe how a Missouri 
community has transformed its site, logical as to trade but 
eccentric as to topography, into a vast gridiron of green and 
beauty, all to the moral elevation of the people and to material 
gain measured by the rank of the third city in percentage of 
increase of population shown by the last government census. 
In "the making of a city" there is not another object lesson 
such as is furnished where the Committee of One Thousand 
now deliberates on plans for the celebration of the centennial 
statehood. 

It was distinctly fitting that Journalism should first 
become a professional study, a part of the university cur- 
riculum, in a State which has been distinguished for its suc- 
cessful newspapers. One newspaper celebrated its centennial 
of continuous and honorable existence twelve years before 
the State completed its hundred years. Three men became 
Missourians by adoption in their young manhood and created 
from modest if not precarious beginnings three of the most 
profitable and influential newspaper properties in the United 
States. They gave to them such distinctive qualities and 
such character that when these guiding hands were cold the 
newspapers went on their prosperous and masterful ways 
without check or loss of prestige in any degree. McCullagh, 
Pulitzer, Nelson! What a journalistic pace they set in the 
first century of Missouri! 



284 MISSOURI HISTORICAL REVIEW. 

The slave population of Missouri was not large in com- 
parison with the white people. Slavery, bad enough at best, 
was mitigated by the patriarchal treatment bestowed by the 
owners, as a rule. In the first list of taxpayers of Missouri 
were several negroes who owned real estate. When Robert 
Lewis went to California with the argonauts of 1849, he took 
with him Jesse Hubbard, his wife's slave. Lewis panned 
"pay dirt" and came back with $15,000. The money was 
divided impartially between master and slave. Hubbard 
took his share and bought a Missouri farm. 

According to the statistician of the State, Missouri 
had, in 1913, nearly 3,800 farms owned by negroes, estimated 
to be worth $27,768,000. Nearly every negro farmer in 
Missouri, the statistician said, had a bank account. 

In 1913, the sweepstakes premium for "the highest 
yield of corn on one acre," awarded by the University of 
Missouri, went to a negro farmer, N. C. Bruce, the head of 
the Bartlett Agricultural and Industrial School for negroes 
at Dalton in Chariton county, one of the centers of Missouri 
slave population before the war. In 1915 Bruce won the 
premium for the United States on corn shown at the San 
Francisco Exposition. His record in 1913 was, officially, 
108 bushels on a single acre. The negro students of the Dalton 
school raised an average of more than sixty-five bushels on 
the entire field of sixty acres. 

"Some of us," wrote Bruce in a personal letter recently, 
"the State's farthest down humanity, want to be saved to 
better service. We want our people to become desirable 
assets instead of a liability on white citizens. We know that 
the farms, farming and domestic service training, offer us 
our best opportunity. We have shown our white neighbors 
and are trying to show white lawmakers and authorities of 
the State that we, country life Missouri black people, are 
worth saving equally as our brothers in Alabama and other 
southern States. We follow the lines of the late Booker T. 
Washington and get even quicker and better results with the 
poorest equipment." 



Missouri's centennial. 285 

A Missourian of the old French stock, hurrying along 
the St. Louis Levee in ante-bellum days to catch a steam- 
boat, tossed his carpetbag to a slave boy to carry. Fewer 
than twenty years later these two Missourians met in the 
United States Senate chamber at Washington. Both were 
United States Senators, Bogy from Missouri, Bruce from Mis- 
sissippi to which State he had gone after his education at 
Harvard. 

Vest, on the floor of the United States Senate, paid this 
tribute to the negro, as he had known him, slave and free: 

"If any man in this world has reason to be their friend, 
I am that man, raised with them, nursed by one, a humble 
owner of them as inherited property. They are a docile, 
gentle, inoffensive race, and the southern man who would 
wrong them deserves to be blotted from the roll of man- 
hood. When our wives and children were in their hands 
during the war they acted so as to make every man of the 
South their friend who had a particle of manhood about 
him." 

In the first constitution of Missouri were a half score 
of sections devoted to slavery. One provided for jury trial 
of a slave charged with serious crime. Another forbade any 
more severe penalty for a convicted negro than for a con- 
victed white man. A third section required the legislature 
to pass laws which would "oblige the owners of slaves to treat 
them with humanity and to abstain from all injuries to 
them extending to life and limb." 

The slaves of Missouri numbered nearly 100,000 when 
the war began. Freedom came suddenly and without prepara- 
tion through the action of a constitutional convention in 1865. 
It was viewed with apprehension by many white Missourians. 
Events showed that the Missouri negro was, as Vest subse- 
quently pictured him. Men of southern birth and training, 
like James E. Yeatman, took hold of the situation. By 
private subscription, funds were raised and schools were 
started for negro children in Missouri. A negro regiment 
composed in the main of former slaves of Missouri started 



286 MISSOURI HISTORICAL REVIEW. 

the fund with which the location for Lincoln Institute at 
Jefferson City to educate negro teachers was purchased. 
When $15,000 had been raised the State redeemed a promise, 
took over the institution and conducted it with public funds. 
Emancipation conditions adjusted themselves in Missouri 
without the years of mistakes and antagonisms which oc- 
curred in the South. One of the first negro schools estab- 
lished in the State, perhaps the first outside of St. Louis, 
was in the outskirts of Kansas City. A supporter of it was 
Jesse James. "But for Jesse James," said the teacher of 
this school, not long before he died, "I could not have kept 
up the school." 



Long before a railroad from the East reached the Illinois 
bank Missouri began stretching the iron parallels toward the 
West. Before the war Missouri had loaned her splendid 
credit toward railroad construction to the amount of $20,- 
701,000. In four years the citizens and city of St. Louis 
had subscribed $6,400,000 to start four railroads in the four 
directions of the compass. That was at the rate of about 
$50, for every man, woman and child of the population. 
Railroad policies in Missouri had elements of popularity in 
those days. One of the first trains across the State was 
rocking its way at night over the primitive roadbed when a 
lusty Missouri infant set up a howling solo which continued 
in spite of the efforts of its mother. The president of the 
road was one of the passengers, he got up from his seat went 
forward and took the baby. He paced up and down the 
aisle of the coach until quiet was restored. As the baby was 
given back to her, the mother apologized for the trouble 
caused. 

"Madam," replied President Robert Morris Stewart, "it 
is the duty of the officers of a railroad to do all they can for 
the comfort of the people who travel with them." 

The pioneer railroad builder of Missouri was Thomas 
Allen, whose father started him in life with a twenty-dollar 
bill. When Mr. Allen had seen the Missouri Pacific well 



Missouri's centennial. - 287 

on the way across the State, he thought of retiring from 
business and devoting himself to his favorite recreation, — 
raising grapes. But he came back. 

"I can't stand it," he said, "I must have occupation for 
all my energies. He took hold of the Iron Mountain railroad, 
then only eighty miles long, and built it through the Ozarks 
and Arkansas to its Texas connections. The ebbing of life 
found Thomas Allen still in the public service of the people 
with whom he had chosen his home. Almost the last words 
of this constructive Missourian were: 

"I would like to live a few years longer. There are some 
things I would like to do for Missouri." 

At the age of thirteen James B. Eads sold apples in the 
commercial district of Missouri. He did it so well that an 
observing merchant gave him a small clerkship and, what 
was more, the privilege of his library. Young Eads invented 
machinery revolutionized the raising of sunken steamboats. 
He built seven ironclads in sixty-five days, with which the 
Union armies opened the Mississippi. He built a bridge 
of such original design and construction that on its com- 
pletion it became one of the engineering wonders of the world. 
He confounded the wise men at Washington with the jetties 
which opened the mouth of the Mississippi. When he went 
abroad the greatest scientific societies of Europe showered 
unusual honors upon him. 



Some years ago. Dean Walter Williams wrote a news- 
paper plea for an adequate history of Missouri. He made it 
plain that no history of the State that was complete had been 
written. He was right. There are histories of Missouri, 
and good histories, but they are histories of Missouri only 
in part. The masterly and exhaustive three volumes of Louis 
Houck come down through the Colonial and the Territorial 
Missouri, and stop at 1820. Trexler's "Slavery in Missouri;" 
Carr's "Missouri, a Bone of Contention;" Shoemaker's 
"Struggle for Statehood;" and several other books on Mis- 
souri are invaluable. All of these efforts go to show what a 
wonderful field Missouri offers to the historical student and 



288 MISSOURI HISTORICAL REVIEW. 

writer. And they suggest this conclusion: No one man 
ever will write a complete history of Missouri. Good Old 
Colonel William F. Switzler delved and wrote fascinating 
Missouri history until he went almost blind. When the 
light failed he was just in the midst of the work he loved. 
Champ Clark began to write history of Missouri and had put 
down on paper 150,000 words, only to realize the vastness 
of the field. No one man will write a complete history of 
Missouri for there is in the State's first century the waiting 
material for scores of volumes on Missouri and for hundreds 
of volumes on Missourians. 



